 And I didn't know there was a campus here in New King's that the Open University had a campus. So it was a bit of a sort of revelation to come down and it was a sunny day like today which probably helped but then I remember coming for my interview and I was a bit early so I sat I sat under some trees I remember and just sort of was calm and tranquil and quiet. I had a very similar feeling when I came here kind of during the summer and then seeing the like the physical space and the actual campus of the Open University was not what I expected I've always been in kind of a more traditional setting and then it actually felt really nice and the immediate like contact that I had with my supervisors as well as fellow colleagues it was just it was a very like mature environment but kind of also very open and flexible. For me coming to the Open University was a bit of a curveball and my friends reacted in that way when I told them that I was coming here because I come from a fairly traditional academic background and I'd wanted to do a PhD for a while but taken some time out to think about what I might do and I chose to come here and I'm so glad I did. It's proved to me that it's really open to really different backgrounds. It's genuinely genuinely part of what I love about being here because our end result is almost identical but our starting places are probably very very removed from each other. I went to a particularly not very nice education establishment where double not getting beaten up on a Wednesday afternoon was my favorite lesson so I left education and I worked for myself for 20 plus years. I love being a PhD student I love being around people who love to learn and to do the research I think it is a fantastic community to be part of. For me it's just been such an experience I think meeting other students from other parts of the world so in my department and in our area for example we've got students from Bangladesh, India, the Czech Republic, Kenya, Nepal, myself you know I came from Nigeria through Canada somewhere. You have such diversity of experiences and of thoughts and of ideas that really really contribute to whatever work it is you're doing. So I think that's really kind of another beauty of the OU because you're not kind of distracted by maybe like the undergraduates which is not always necessarily a bad thing but you know you're like you're really focused with with peers at kind of your level and you understand what you guys are going through. I think the peer group where you now can have those intellectual conversations with with academics who may be working on something similar to to your area of work and you know you can even ask them questions about about the particular work and I think it exposes you to you know new ideas or other ideas within the within the discipline that that can inform your work. I think the fact that you are you are on campus you know is you are all here you can make those things a bit more easily you've got access to those people because they they're not running around giving lectures to undergraduates all the time so that's a big advantage as well and so yeah I think you're exactly right there are there are just those opportunities to to link across different areas and my first day here I walked into the lab and there's a board on the lab and the lab currently has I think it's 81 people from 23 countries who speak 17 different languages and about 10% of those are PhD students it took me I would imagine a year to 18 months to get over the terror of the supervision meeting and realizing that it wasn't a teacher sitting there with a big red pen ready to go wrong wrong it was an actual a collaborative developmental process with your supervisor and alongside that then you have the other PhD students in STEM because there are massive highs there are massive lows and I know there are some bits of this that I don't think I would have got through without the support of both the supervisor and the rest of the faculty and I think that that you know we are on a journey together and it's supportive it's friendly and it's very non-competitive which is the key thing I think I know of some universities where it does seem like it's a rivalry so if you kind of look at the the OU and kind of their history and what they what they stand for in terms of you know open access and really believing that education is for everyone I think they still hold so true to that to that mentality and you see it kind of manifests in in the PhD groups because you know like you said it's just it's it's so different and and even international students that come in they they just feel welcomed because at the end of it they value people who are passionate about learning yeah so for me the main reason I think that I would recommend other students come to the University would be probably because of the flexibility and just having you know you can be on campus all the time you can be off campus so just yeah for me that flexibility has been a massive thing and a massive reason why why I came to the Open University and yeah the expertise the people that you work with like you said they're world leaders in the fields in the research when I compare what others receive and what what I receive studying here just the overall support you know these are great reasons to to consider studying at the OU for me it's been a amazing to be an institution where interdisciplinary research is so natural and it's so much part of what is done here I think the the quality of supervision is incredible and the support they offer along the way and I think that's that's really what stands out to me as being the main reason why I would recommend it to others the Open University is on the cutting edge of world-class research that's going on what the Open University has done in terms of the European Space Agency and collaborations with that particularly with Apollo at the moment the I say the level of research is world class and it is outstanding and to be here and to be part of that is phenomenal